


Cherry Crisp

by caffeineivore



Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
Genre: Character Study, Divorced parents, F/M, Food as a Metaphor for Love, Light Angst, Vignette, ami reflects on love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-18 17:00:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16521071
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/caffeineivore/pseuds/caffeineivore
Summary: Ami Mizuno is not much of a chef, but something about the precision of baking appeals to her. Originally posted to tumblr, the prompt was Ami, pie, and spooky. A/Z if you squint, hints about Ami's parents as well. One-shot vignette type of thing.





	Cherry Crisp

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lrritable_vowel_types](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lrritable_vowel_types/gifts).



> In case anyone's curious, the recipe really works!

_Preheat oven to 200 degrees Celsius/400 degrees Fahrenheit/Gas Mark 6._

Ami is not much of a chef, generally speaking. The creation of fine cuisine– the type featured in gourmet restaurants and cooking shows on television, require both an adventuresome sort of creativity and a strong basis in technique. She considers her skills in the kitchen pedestrian at best– certainly capable of following a simple recipe (to the letter), but unlike Makoto, she’d have no idea what combinations of herbs and spices worked with what types of food, or what was the proper way to filet a fish or braise a roast. And while she could certainly tell someone the slight differences in the chemical compositions of table salt as opposed to sea salt, she did not know _why_ one might use the former to season pasta water but the latter to prep a steak. 

Baking, though, is rather less stressful. There is a precision to it– a sort of reliability in the way one could predict the results based on ingredient portions and temperature and quality, the chemical reactions of leavening agents and stabilizers and binding agents and so on. Ami does not flatter herself that she has the chops for fantastically-decorated wedding cakes or so on, but she can produce perfectly adequate everyday pies and cookies, steady and precise as a lab experiment. She is diligent and conscientious, and not likely to get distracted by video games until a smoke alarm goes off and something burns to a crisp. 

_Pit and halve cherries, macerating in a non-reactive pie pan with 1 cup of sugar, 1 tsp of cornstarch, 1 tsp of almond extract and 2 tbsp lemon juice._

The cherry crisp recipe is one of Makoto’s favourites– easy and popular, and while Makoto no doubt has some ingenious quick way of removing the stones from the tiny fruit, Ami cuts each one open precisely along its seam, then cuts out the pit with the careful hands of a surgeon. This process takes quite a while, but she’s patient, and moreover, she doesn’t do this every day. It’s odd, she thinks, that such sweet fruit have seeds full of amygdalin ( _deadly things in beautiful packages, she thinks ironically_ ), and while she’s quite sure that the probability of one chipping a tooth on a cherry pit is a great deal greater than one eating great quantities of them and dying of acute cyanide poisoning, she takes care to remove every trace of the pits. Her fingers are stained red like a trauma surgeon’s by the time the fruit are actually macerating– a fancy word for a type of food-preparation osmosis– and at least, she thinks, here a doctor and a chef would have the same technique to wash the red off their hands. 

_Cut one stick of cold butter into one cup of flour, one tsp of salt and half a cup of white sugar, and mix in two tbsp of cold water until it forms a crumbly dough. Sprinkle over the prepared cherries to form the streusel topping._

It’s sort of fascinating how in baking, the lipids in butter mix into water as though they weren’t hydrophobic macromolecules by definition. Then again, real life is never quite as neat as science. People, too, defy logic and standardized deductive reasoning, mixing and mingling or breaking and separating so terribly easily, one moment to the next. Love is no indication of forever– it might vanish as quickly and completely as morning dew, leaving nothing but a carefully-never-mentioned void, once filled with the memory of the smell of turpentine, or perhaps the flutter of dark-gold eyelashes over green eyes. 

_Bake, uncovered, for 45-55 minutes, or until the crust is golden brown and the fruit are nicely soft. Check at the half-hour mark to make sure that the crust is not browning too quickly. If it is, cover loosely with aluminum foil for the last few minutes of baking._

Ami has made this recipe twice before, and had learned, from experience, to put the pie pan on a foil-lined baking sheet before placing it in the oven. This is not mentioned in the recipe itself, but heat causes the water in the fruit mixture to expand, and then the bottom of the oven is marred by drips of burnt-crimson that look like healing scabs against the metal. It’s easier to wash a baking sheet– odd aluminum armour– than scrub those dried-blood-red scars from the heart of the oven.

 _Cool on a rack for at least half an hour, then serve garnished with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream._

It is sort of coincidental that cherry season coincides with the end of summer– just in time, perhaps, for Obon. It is not, perhaps, traditional fare to honour and absolve the ghosts of those cursed to roam the realm of the living– dead following a lifetime of broken vows and unfulfilled promises. Ami justifies it because of the convenience– cherries are in season, and cheap and plentiful– and practicality– the recipe is practically fool-proof and well-loved by all of the girls. Usagi, on one occasion, tucked away half a pie to herself without even a hint of a stomach upset in spite of the acidity of the fruit and the fat content of the crust. 

She does not explain or justify, even to herself, the slice that she leaves on the traditional Obon altar, amidst the incense and other offerings. 

In another never-alluded-to time, a man and a woman took vows under trees ripe with red fruit, thinking that love would be enough in spite of his absent-mindedness and her ambition. 

In another never-alluded-to life, a lover– the one and only– always appeared in a flurry of pink petals. Something beautiful, haunting, before it became deadly.

It is not traditional or fancy fare. 

But it is her poor best, a quiet, careful promise to always remember.


End file.
